


Hey, Hold My Mask of Normalcy for a Second

by soft_october



Series: A Dragon Ate My Term Paper [2]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, College, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Mentions of addiction, mentions of drug use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-12
Updated: 2016-02-12
Packaged: 2018-05-19 22:26:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5982808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soft_october/pseuds/soft_october
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawke's days at Kirkwall College have been filled with thwarted thieves, long nights of drinking and plenty of running away from her own feelings. But when her best friend and partner in crime refuses to come back to school after his brother dies, Hawke realizes that sometimes, running towards things might be the answer instead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hey, Hold My Mask of Normalcy for a Second

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: This is NSFW folks, and features drinking and mentions of drug addiction

Anya Hawke grips the steering wheel with white knuckles and tries in vain not to be upset by the traffic on the George Washington Bridge, a never ending chain of red brake lights that stretches on and on into the early morning blackness. She huddles deeper into her coat and regrets her decision not to get the heater in her old jeep fixed for the fiftieth time in three hours. She tries to focus her eyes forward, and not to the thick cables that hold up the bridge or the dark water that rolls beneath. Hawke hates bridges. When she was a kid she used to have a recurring nightmare that she, her mother, Carver and Bethany had been in their car and it had flown off a bridge and plunged into the icy water below. The fear remains, but she longs for the nightmares again. 

At least in her nightmares they had all been together. 

She picks up her phone from the passenger seat and throws it at the windshield when it still shows no new texts. She grabs it again and flicks through her conversation with Varric one last time, just to make sure. Still nothing. Nothing but that last, infuriating text from him followed by a series of increasingly frantic texts from her. 

-I’m not coming back-

She presses the call button next to Varric’s name. “Hello!” the voicemail chirps. “You’ve reached 516-” Hawke throws the phone again and screams in frustration. 

 

Hawke met Varric on her second day at Kirkwall State College in Thedas, N.Y., a school known more for its party reputation than its academics. Someone in the library tried to jack her bag while her back was turned and what would have been a frantic chase ended abruptly when Varric stuck his leg out and tripped the guy. 

“I would’ve got him,” said Hawke. 

“Of course you would have, kiddo,” said Varric as he handed her the bag. “I just helped you along a little.”

The would be thief was sprawled out on the marble slabs of the library floor, moaning about a broken nose and bleeding, but Hawke barely noticed him. Varric was the center of her focus now, with his smug attitude and snide remark. She was so prepared to hate Varric, from his last unfastened shirt button to the tip of his blonde ponytail. She didn’t need this guy’s help. 

“Well, just leave it next time,” she mumbled. 

“Said the girl who didn’t know how to say thank you,” he replied. Hawke shuffled for a minute, then rallied. 

“Thank you, kind stranger, for sparing me an extra twenty feet of running after an idiot. I am truly in your debt.” She finished with a grin and an exaggerated flourish, hoping her weirdness would be enough to make him stand down. But he rose to her bait instead, bowing to her and offering his hand.

“I am but your loyal servant,” he said with a lopsided grin. “C’mon, let’s go grab drinks.” Hawke shrugged. She never turned down a drink. 

Hawke was under twenty one, but that didn’t seem to matter to the bartender at The Circle, a local bar that carried a bunch of craft brews, once Varric walked in. He bought them a pitcher of beer and they sat at the outside tables and Hawke listened and laughed at Varric’s stories and it was around her fourth drink that any thought of hating him vanished utterly. He might be the son of some stupidly rich CEO of a big stockbroker firm in the city, but Varric was funny and more real than she ever would have thought at first glance. And hey, he was handsome too. He was okay in her book. 

“You’re pretty cool, kiddo,” Varric told her at the end of the night. “Let’s do it again sometime, okay?” Hawke agreed, not knowing he didn’t mean it that way, because Hawke never understood, she just jumped and nodded and said yes to things that sounded like fun because they could be gone in an instant, and Varric sounded like a lot of fun. His phone buzzed with a text, and he laughed at something on his phone screen, and she asked him about it. 

“Just talking to Bianca.” He didn’t say who Biance was, but Hawke wasn’t an idiot. She knew how to draw conclusions. “She’s wondering if she has to worry about you.” He said it with a grin, and that meant it was a joke, so Hawke laughed along. 

 

The traffic starts moving again an hour later and her phone finally rings. She snatches at it, eager, but it’s only Isabela. She sighs and answers anyway. Isabela never woke up this early so she must just be getting back to their dorm.

“Where the fuck are you?” Isabela demands as a greeting. 

“Somewhere in the Bronx, I think? I left a note.” 

“What the hell are you doing there?” 

“I…” she doesn’t know how to tell Isabela. She doesn’t know how to put her feelings into words because she’s never known, everyone died or went away before she learned how to tell them how she felt. 

“Wait a minute,” says Isabela, not yelling. “You’re going after him, aren’t you?” Hawke sighs into the phone. 

“Yeah,” she says.

“Bring that bastard home,” Isabela replies. “If anyone of us could do it, it’s you. Get him out of that damn house and bring him back here.”

“I’ll try.” 

“Good. Call me if you need backup.”

“You don’t have a car.”

“There are so many car keys just lying around on this campus. I have plenty of cars. And Hawke?”

“Yeah?” 

“If you hold off on hooking up for two weeks, I win a bet with Fenris. So, you know, maybe help me out here?”

That finally gets Hawke to crack a smile. 

“We both know that’s not happening, but thanks for the support.”

“Whatever you say, Hawke. Good luck.” Isabela hangs up. 

Still no texts from Varric. 

 

Hawke, who had expected to spend her first few semesters sequestered like a monk with her books, quickly made more friends at college, but Varric held sway with her as her very first and best friend. Any Friday night could find the two of them crowded into a booth at the Hanged Man, or Varric running the numbers and collecting bets every time someone challenged Hawke to a drinking competition. They made a killing off frat guys trying to prove something. Hawke was the champion of drinking contests. 

If Varric wasn’t around, Hawke knew he was with Bianca, and he was gone a few times a month. 

Bianca seemed nice enough, and if she wasn’t sometimes dating Hawke’s best friend, she might have even liked her. But Hawke wasn’t blind, even if Varric seemed to be sometimes. Bianca would be demanding he come down to New York City to be with her one minute, and telling him she never wanted to see him again the next. It didn’t help that she was related to some other bigwig in the financial industry and Varric’s dad saw the whole relationship as some “sleeping with the enemy” type bullshit. It only made the two of them want each other more, and made their breakups uglier. 

She didn’t mind being the one to pick up the pieces every time he and Bianca were on the outs. It was fine. Hawke was good at helping. That’s what she was doing when he leaned his head on her shoulder after she took him out drinking when he was pretending not to be upset by Bianca’s constant games. She was helping. If she kept telling herself that all she wanted to do was help, eventually it would be true. 

Varric was the one who invited her to the city that summer between freshman and sophomore year. Hawke didn’t have family, didn’t have anywhere to go, and she had been planning on staying in Thedas and picking up another job somewhere, but Varric wouldn’t hear any of it. They lived in a swanky apartment uptown and spent their days bumming around the city, making friends and going to parties, or lying on the grass in Central Park while he wrote and she pointed out dirty things she saw in the clouds. 

They went to a fancy club really late one night with Varric’s brother Bartrand and a few of his friends, the kind of club with private rooms and employees that looked the other way. Bartrand was the one who brought the blow, and insisted she partake.  
.  
Hawke tried it but she didn’t like what it did to her heart and her breathing or the way Bartrand’s friends started to look at her, appraising her like she was on sale at an auction, and she didn’t take anymore even though she wanted too. Varric did take more, and so did Bartrand and his friends. It all might have turned out fine, but Bartrand’s friends didn’t know how to take no for an answer from her no matter how many times Hawke and Varric told them and within an hour the brothers were on their feet screaming at each other about friends and girlfriends and their childhoods and Hawke was desperately trying to drag Varric out the door before one of these idiots pulled a gun on them or something. 

She finally got him down to the street without anyone calling the police but she had no idea where to go, she didn’t know the city like he did. Varric eventually calmed down enough to tell how to get to the subway and Hawke managed to get them both on the E train uptown. 

When they sat down on the periwinkle plastic seats Varric leaned his head back against the window and grabbed her hand tight. He wouldn’t let go, and it was a moment before Hawke realized he was crying. 

“What… Varric what’s the matter.”

“Everything, kiddo,” he sighed. “Everything is the matter.” 

She reached into her back pocket and handed him her flask. 

 

They had never talked about that night again, had they? Hawke wonders. Whatever. They talk about enough things, like Hawke’s dead family and Varric’s family problems and freaking Bianca. 

Hawke regrets her decision to drive through New York City during the morning rush hour, but she doesn’t know where she’s going and this is the way the stupid phone GPS is telling her to go. She considers running down every jaywalking pedestrian that crosses her path and wastes her time but spending a few years in jail for manslaughter is probably not going to make her mood any better, so she refrains. 

The sky is lighter now, a steely grey instead of the black she’s been driving in for the past seven hours. It’s almost pretty. 

Her GPS says she’ll be at Varric’s house in two hours, and it’s one line of trafficky red all the way. 

 

After that night at the club, Hawke stuck closer to Varric than usual for a few weeks. If her friends noticed they didn’t say anything, at least not to her. They went to their usual clubs and bars and hung out like normal people. Everyone in Thedas thought that Hawke was the drinking champion. Hawke knew she was the champion of pretending normalcy. 

But she wasn’t normal, was she? Or maybe she was trying to hard, being too normal. Either way, the mask shattered into pieces one night at the Gallows, a skeevy dive pretty far off their usual circuit. They went because there were pool tables at The Gallows, and Isabela liked to fleece locals for all they were worth. 

She should have made them all leave when she saw those stupid frat boys walk in, the Sigma Nu’s or the Knights or the Templars or whatever they were calling themselves to sound cool. She should have known that it was going to be trouble when one of them hit on Isabela and she laughed at him. Guys like that didn’t like it when you laughed at them. But Cullen was with them, and he was usually okay at keeping his idiot friends in line. Hawke and Cullen sometimes even had a decent conversation or two when they ran into each other on a night out, and he’d never tried to get her into bed even once, which was more than she could say for the rest of his usual crew. Sometimes he even seemed like a decent person. 

She should have known better than to trust a handsome face. 

Hawke hadn’t noticed Cullen and his friends heading to the bathroom every fifteen minutes at first, she was too busy watching Isabela work her con, and by the time she did it was too late. Their eyes glittered and they talk loudly and hurriedly, and lost all sense of personal space. 

“Hey babe, you’re too pretty to be sitting all alone.” One of the Knights sat down next to her in her booth. His body spray threatened to overwhelm her faster than his sleaze did. 

“I’m not sure how good your observational skills are, but you’re sitting in my friend’s seat.”

“That guy?” he asked, pointing to Varric at the bar. “I see you with him all the time and I gotta tell you honey, you might not think it, but I think you can do a little better. Your hair up, a dress that shows some skin, you’d be hotter than anything else in the room.” Hawke didn’t know if it was the jab at Varric, the terrible attempt at negging or some toxic combination of the two. She did know that her blood was boiling and she wanted this ugly person with his terrible smell as far away from her as possible. 

“Please leave me alone,” she said, looking him squarely in the face. “Your inability to read contextual clues is really going to give you a handicap later in life, so let me help you out this one time. I am not interested in you. I do not want to talk to you.” 

He looked at her like he didn’t realize she was something that could speak, and blinked a few times. 

“I’m pretty sure she asked you to go.” Varric was back, and he was not happy. She could tell the way he gripped the neck of the beer bottle he was carrying in his right hand that he was wondering if he should be ready to crack it on the table or club someone with it. That wasn’t happening. 

“Come on Varric, this place is a shithole anyway, and I’m sure we’ve absorbed more than enough bad smells for one night!” Hawke climbed up on the seat of the booth and scooted her ass over the top of the table to get away from the guy, dancing away when he made an ill conceived and half hearted attempt to grab at her. She hoped that Varric wouldn’t notice but of course he did, and of course he would have something to say about it. 

“Man, sucks that you failed kindergarten,” he quipped. “Even five year olds learn to keep their hands to themselves.” 

Hawke had both feet on the floor. 

“C’mon Varric,” she said, watching the guy’s big friends gather around. She looked at Cullen for a glimmer of recognition, a life line, but there was nothing in his expression that said he recognized her as anything but a girl who had slighted one of his boys. Her mouth insisted on running itself off anyway. “I think we should talk to the dean about these guys, Varric. Help them out with some remedial courses. Maybe if they had some basic social niceties, they wouldn’t have such a hard time getting laid.” Two of them expressed their opposing opinions with rude words and gestures. Fuck. Now they were stupid and angry. Hawke scanned the bar for Isabela, but she was nowhere to be found. Varric passed her one of the bottles and she gripped it tight, poised to smash it over someone’s head. 

“Wait, you’re Hawke!” Cullen exclaimed. Fucking christ, now he remembered? “What are you always doing with these losers?” he asked, indicating Varric and motioning towards the bar where he must have thought Isabela remained. “They’re not like you and me. They’re not normal. Unless… is it because he’s rich?” He was close enough to poke Varric in the shoulder. Cullen’s eyes were bright and manic and Hawke had just about had it. 

“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” she screamed, pushing him away from Varric. “No one likes you and your fucking cokehead friends trying to get their dicks wet by being assholes.” 

“Goddamn why are you such a bitch?” asked one of the guys behind her. She kept her eyes on Cullen. She had seen a flash of something human behind his eyes, before that smarmy veil was yanked back over it. 

“Ha, right? What’s her problem?” he asked his friend. He tried to do it over her head, to dismiss her, but Hawke was too tall. He had to go on his toes for a moment, and Hawke was waiting for it. 

She rammed her shoulder into his chest, sending his off balance body reeling and crashing to the floor. His dumb friends surrounded her in an instant before Isabela squeezed between them and materialized beside her, switchblade sprung and in hand. 

“I don’t think you want to do this,” Isabela said, looking the biggest one in the eye. “Wipe your friend off the floor and get out of here.” There was an instant when no one knew what the next person would do, and the whole room held its breath.

Then one of the frat guys backed away. The rest followed him out the door one by one, never turning their back on the women in the middle of the room. 

None of them helped Cullen off the floor. He picked himself up as they left. 

“Hawke-” he began, maybe to apologize, maybe to try and fix it, maybe to dig himself deeper, but it was too late and Hawke was done. 

“Cullen, get the fuck out,” she breathed, low and dangerous. “You’re a goddamn disgrace. No wonder you got kicked out of Ferelden University, coke problem like yours. If you ever speak to me again, I’ll do more than lay you out on the floor.” It was cruel and terrible and a low blow but she didn’t care. He was about to say something else, then thought better of it and left, leaving his unspoken words to rot on the barroom floor.

Hawke, Isabela and Varric made tracks out of there not soon after. Isabela vanished somewhere on the walk back to the dorms, leaving Hawke and Varric alone with the silence that ate the space between them like acid. 

“Are you okay?” said Varric, eventually “That got a little… weird.” 

“Nope,” she replied breezily. “But you’ve known that since we met.” He chuckled. 

“Yeah kiddo, you got that one right. Not every day you and Isabela try to kill a guy in a bar though. What was that all about?” 

“He insulted your virtue of course,” said Hawke. “I could never let such a brute impugn your honor.” Varric threw back his head and laughed. Hawke told herself that she didn’t notice how the streetlamps caught his eyes when he looked back at her. 

“My knight in shining armour,” he joked. 

“Always,” she replied. It almost didn’t hurt to say it. 

 

Hawke pulls up to the gates of his dad’s stupid little Long Island mansion and presses the button on the intercom. So formal. Varric hates this place. He hates being home, he hates the pressure his family puts on him, and, at this point, Hawke is more than a little certain that he maybe hates himself. He will hate her too after what she is about to do, violating his privacy and his repeated attempts to make it clear that he wants to be left alone, but she doesn’t care. This place isn’t good for Varric and he’s been here for months - ever since his brother died from a drug overdose in his bedroom closet. Far be it for her to tell people how to mourn, but Varric just keeps getting worse, and it’s time for him to come back with her, back to Kirkwall, back where he belongs. 

The speaker buzzes. 

“Can I help you?” says the security drone on the other side of the intercom. 

“I need to talk to Varric,” she says hurriedly. “Tell him it’s Hawke.” 

“One moment please.” Hawke drums her fingers anxiously on the steering wheel. What is she going to say to him? How can she convince him that he needs to get out of here? 

“Mr. Tethras is not here,” the voice crackles. 

“I’m not looking for Mr. Tethras, I’m looking for Varric!” Hawke practically shouts at the speaker. 

“Mr. Varric Tethras is not here,” the voice says, far more firmly this time. “He will be informed of your attempt to contact him when he returns.” 

“I know he’s there!” Hawke is shouting now. “Varric, stop being a dick and make them open up these stupid gates!” There is no response from the speaker. She is being dismissed. 

Hawke thinks about what she is going to do for a nanosecond before she does it. Thinking ahead isn’t what Hawke does. What’s the point in planning for anything when it might get ripped away from you at any second? So Hawke appraises the gates to Varric’s mansion with an eye that is less than critical before she backs her jeep up a hundred or so feet. 

And then slams her foot onto the gas and rams into the gates at full speed. 

For all his money and talk about appearances, Varric’s dad didn’t buy a security system worth shit. The gates pop off their hinges and fall to either side of the drive. Her hood is all fucked up, maybe one of her lights is broken, or ripped off, but who cares? 

All the money that should have gone to the gates and the security system has apparently gone to hiring armed thugs as actual security guards, as Hawke soon realizes when she parks and steps out of her jeep. One of the wheels is up on the first step to the mansion and at least seven guys have surrounded her, hands on their waists like they’re going to shoot her in the face for property damage. Hawke laughs.

“You’re kidding me right? You’re going to kill me for some gates? Blow me.” She makes to push past one, but he grabs her by the arms in an iron grip. 

“The police are being called,” he drawls in a monotone. “You will wait here until they can come arrest you.” Hawke is about to drum up a biting remark that would make him mad enough to do something stupid, but she never gets the chance. 

“The police aren’t being called Gerav,” mumbles a voice from the front door. “I’m sure dad can buy a new set of gates.” Hawke looks up. There stands Varric, in sweatpants and a hoodie, looking pale and tired and generally like shit. She must have woken him up. He is the best thing Hawke had ever seen. 

“I’m sure he can,” she agrees. “Now that I’m here, you wouldn’t mind calling off the hounds, inviting me in, ringing for tea, things your sort of people do for their friends?” Varric heaves a sigh and won’t look at her. 

“Yeah. Sure. Come on in.” Hawke smiles smugly at Gerav and twists her arm out of his grip. She follows Varric up the stairs outside, up the stairs inside, and through a complicated series of hallways and corridors. 

“Is this place set up to confuse kidnappers?” she asks. “It seems they’d wander for days without food or drink before they found you.” Varric shrugs. 

“Don’t know. I didn’t build it.” 

He opens one door that looked exactly like all the others and they walk into his room. 

It’s the first time Hawke has ever seen Varric’s childhood bedroom, and to say she is disturbed by the sight of it would be a bit of an understatement. Hawke is horrified. At his place back home, everything screamed Varric, from the notebooks and the pens and the half empty mugs of coffee and bottles of wine that sat on every surface to the immaculate collection of his favorite first editions, kept high and out of reach of any calamity that might befall them. His walls were covered in prints of paintings he liked and the Christmas lights that they had strung together last holiday season and never taken down. 

Varric’s room at home resembles something out of Better Home and Gardens in that it is perfectly coordinated, perfectly spotless, and perfectly Un-Varric. The only human touch in the entire room is a small framed picture on the desk by the door with its back toward her. 

“Didn’t realized they made you live in a hospital room,” Hawke blurts out. “I would have gone for an asylum room myself. Nice padded walls you can bounce off of and they don’t care if you draw all over them.” Varric still isn’t smiling. He sits down on his bed with the picture perfect comforter and stares at her from under heavily lidded eyes. Hawke has never seen him like this before, and she is very determined not to be frightened. 

“What are you doing here?” he asks.”I told you not to come.”

“Yup, exactly the reaction I was expecting,” she says brightly. “I’ve come to take you home, because this whole thing -” here she indicates with an intricate series of hand motions the room, how Varric is looking and acting, her action of blowing the gates off their hinges - “it totally isn’t working for you, or me. Can’t have drinking games with someone who isn’t there.” 

“I thought I made it pretty clear that I wasn’t planning on coming back,” he says.

“Right, I know you said that, but you always say stupid shit when you’re drinking. I assumed you were hungover and needed me to drive all the way down here and take care of you, because god knows no one else can deal with you when you’re drunk.” I’m the only one who knows how to take care of you, she doesn’t say. I want you to want me to help you, and I want you to be there to take care of me too.

“Hawke.” Varric sighs. “Things are different now. My brother is dead and I have all this stuff heaped on to me. I don’t have - I don’t have time for games anymore.” 

“You don’t have time for me? Bullshit.” Anger boils up. This is total bullshit. Her mother is dead. Carver is dead. Their father is dead and Bethany is halfway across the globe twelve time zones away. Varric is the only family Hawke has, and if he wants to pull this holier than thou nonsense about adhering to family and duty he can pull it on someone who actually believes it. “I’ve been listening to your stories for two years, I know when you’re lying. Things haven’t changed at all.” 

“Really?” he says, his voice rising. “The fact that my brother is dead and my parents expect me to take over the company doesn’t change anything?” 

“When have you ever listened to what your parents wanted?” 

“When they had someone else who actually listened to them!” Varric is on his feet now, advancing on her. “It’s all me now, Hawke! It’s all me and I can’t be at your beck and call anymore at all hours of the night because you can’t handle your own issues!” 

“Oh yeah?” Hawke can feel her fury slipping through her control, and knew it was too late to stop it. She jabs a finger into his chest. “Well I’ve just about had it being your emotional dumping ground whenever Bianca freezes you out again!” She picks up the picture on the desk, surely one of Varric and Bianca in fancy dress clothes at some expensive function, and hurls it against the wall. The sound of the glass shattering is unbelievably satisfying, like shattering Bianca’s face.“Where is she now, Varric? Letting you go through all this shit on your own, waiting for you to come crawling back to her when she’s ready for you?” 

“Go get a fucking date, Hawke!” He has her backed up against the door and for once in Anya Hawke’s life there is nowhere she can retreat to. “Stop hanging around me and all my problems if that’s how you feel about it! Just go! I told you not to come down here! Why are you here?!” Their yelling has reached a fever pitch, their faces frozen in matching anger to conceal the pain that swirls just beneath. For an instant, there is nothing but the sound of their heavy breathing. 

Then Hawke yanks Varric’s face toward her and kisses him. 

There is no tenderness in her kiss. She presses her lips to his too hard, drags her teeth across his lips until he opens for her, and her tongue plunges into his mouth. He makes a muffled sound of surprise but Hawke didn’t care. She twists her tongue around his, licks the roof of his mouth, sucks at his bottom lip, twists her hands into his hair, burns herself on his stubble as she rotates her head for a better angle. His body presses hers against the door and everywhere their bodies touch feels so fucking good that she pulls him even closer, needs more contact like she needs oxygen. She has wanted this for so long that if this is to be the first and only time she wants to know all of it, every taste, every sensation, every vibration from the small groans he is making in the back of his throat that go right to her belly. It is a kiss that blazes and sears like a wildfire and so focused is she on recording every feeling that she doesn’t realize that Varric is an enthusiastic participator in the new direction their argument had taken until she feels his big hands cupping the sides of her face, thumbs gently brushing away tears on her cheeks that she doesn’t remember shedding. She tries to jerk away from him then, because it’s getting to be too real, but there is still no room behind her, and she slams her head against the door instead of making a skilled retreat. 

“Ow,” she cries out, ears ringing from the impact. “Fuck!”

“That’s not the usual reaction a guy hopes for,” quips Varric, back to joking, back to normal, and it is all too much and too wrong and all of it just totally sucks. She titters a high pitched hysterical laugh, her vision blurry through tears she refused to blink away. 

“Well then,” she says, letting her mouth take over for her brain. “I’m sure I’ve answered your question pretty well, if there’s any doubt just call me, I think you know the number. Now if you don’t mind I’m like 90% sure that your front steps are a tow away zone and if I don’t move it now they’ll impound me and you know with the front bumper damage now I’ll never get that thing out of the impound lot!” She scrambles for the door handle, finds it, tries to pull the door while standing against it and finally pushes it open and tumbles out into the hall on her ass. She has to get out of here right now, before Varric processes what she’s done because maybe if they don’t talk about it they can pretend that none of it happened and go back to whatever they had been before. 

“Hawke,” says Varric, and it is soft and gentle and so full of awe Hawke doesn’t want to think about what it means because all her thoughts are too full of hope and futures for comfort. She scrambles to her feet but before she can run through the weird, twisting hallways in a desperate bid for escape he traps one of her hands in both of his. 

“Hawke,” he says again, and she turns to face him because she is powerless to do anything else. “C’mon, stop. Come back inside.” 

“I don’t,” she mumbles, and her voice is too shaky, so she takes a deep breath and tries again. “I don’t want to have a big talk about this, Varric. Just... Just come home, and I won’t mention it again, okay?” 

“Anya, look at me.” Varric never uses her first name, ever. He softly turns her chin toward him and her heart titters against the bars of her rib cage, threatening an escape at any moment. “Anya, I thought it was just me.” 

He kisses her then, and this kiss is everything that the last one wasn’t. It is smooth, quiet, like teardrops of rain sliding down window panes during a storm. Hawke is the first to break it, leaning her forehead against his. 

“But…,” she whispers, and she doesn’t actually want to know the answer to her next question. “What about, you know…”

“Hawke, when was the last time I saw Bianca?” Hawke shrugs. In the last few months Bianca has been too painful to even think about, and she tried to direct Varric to any other topic every time she came up. 

“I’ve spent practically every minute of my free time with one person for the last year, and when you weren’t around it wasn’t Bianca I was thinking about.” The confusion that had bloomed in Hawke’s chest in place of blind panic begins to ease. Was that what Varric had been trying to tell her the night before he’d gotten the awful news about Bartrand? That he and Bianca had called it quits for good? 

“She knew, the last time I saw her,” he continues. “She told me to stop dicking around like an idiot when it came to you.” Bianca had let him go? Hawke decides to take back some of the nasty words she had thought about Bianca, and all the things she has wanted to tell Varric for the last year and a half begin to fight to be the first out of her mouth. 

“Isabela will be furious with us,” she says instead. “If we had waited two more weeks she was going to win some bet she had with Fenris.” Varric laughs softly and pulls her tight to him, clinging to her. Hawke buries her face into his shoulder and suddenly feels drained and exhausted, inside and out. She grabs his arm and makes for the bed. 

“Whoa, moving a little fast aren’t we, sweetheart?” 

“Not according to everyone else,” she replies. There is a hysterical little smile playing about her lips, and she wonders for a moment if she flew off the George Washington Bridge at some point in the early hours of the morning and this is all some sort of crazy hallucination as she plunges toward the Hudson River. How many hours has she been awake? “Besides, it’s just sleeping. I don’t… I don’t think I’ve slept in two days or something.” She means it to be funny, but she would have to be blind not to catch the flash of guilt that flies across his features. 

“Okay,” he says, and she crashes down on the bed when he releases her. Her body softly bounces across the down comforter. “I’ll join you in a second.

“Varric this is like sleeping in heaven,” she says, muffled by fabric. “Why do you let me sleep in the squalor of t-shirt fabric sheets when I kick you out of your bed at home?” He chuckles warmly. The pillows smell like his shampoo, and she burrows into them, watching as he walks across the room to get the picture frame she hurled against the wall. She tries not to feel the stab of jealousy. She won. She’s in his bed. He’s just cleaning up broken glass. 

The frame is bent, destroyed, and he throws it along with the biggest shards of glass into a nearby trash bin. He takes the photo with him and places it on the nightstand beside Hawke’s head. She resists as long as she can, but gives in to the temptation of looking when Varric sits down on the bed beside her to take off his socks. 

It’s not a picture of Varric and Bianca at some New York socialite function, gowns and black ties and golden light in the background, like she suspected. It’s a picture of the two of them, Hawke and Varric, in a booth at the Hanged Man. She remembers this particular night. Varric had just finished telling her some story that made her laugh so hard beer almost came out of her nose, and someone, probably Merrill, had snapped the picture at the exact moment Hawke had closed her eyes, mouth wide open in a silent laugh. In the photo Varric is looking at her like she’s never seen him look at her before. The real Varric cups her chin and turns her face toward him. Oh. Well, how she’s never seen him look at her before this very moment. 

Hawke feels tears prick her eyes when he kisses her this time. He climbs into bed behind her and pulls her back flush against his chest. She drapes his arm over her like she had wanted to do so many times before, and mumbles a happy noise of contentment. 

Sleep has never come so easy. 

 

When Hawke wakes up orange light is pouring into the room and Varric is gone. The empty space beside her is still warm, and Hawke stretches and rolls into it. 

Varric’s bedroom door opens and she lifts a groggy head in its direction. 

“Hey sleepyhead,” says Varric. “I made the cook send us some food.” He’s carrying a tray with a bunch dishes topped with silver covers. 

“I don’t remember ordering room service.”

“Don’t get used to it,” he replies. “No room service back where we’re going.” The words spread warmth through her. Varric isn’t staying here. He’s coming back home with her. 

“Come here,” she says, and the air in the room grows thick. Varric clears his throat and sets the food down on the desk before approaching her side of the bed. 

“Hawke if-” She yanks him down to the bed and covers his mouth with her own. He groans and plants his hands on either side of her head, pressing his weight down on top of her. She hitches up a leg and wraps it around his waist, trapping him, but going by the growing pressure between his legs, she’s pretty sure he doesn’t mind. She grins wickedly against his lips and grinds her hips up towards him. 

“Someone’s excited, huh?” she asks. He dips a hand under her shirt in reply and the shock of his bare skin on her stomach is enough to make her bite her bottom lip. He snakes another hand up her back to prop her up while he searches for the clasp on her bra and bends his head toward her throat to drag kisses along the sensitive skin of her neck. She gasps and rakes her nails up the back of his shirt, cupping the back of his head as he sinks lower, stubble scratching the tops of her breasts as he gently nips and licks. 

“Someone has been wanting you in his bed for a long time,” he replies, gruffly. He finally unclasps her bra and pulls it and her shirt over her head, leaving her half exposed in the warm room. She manages to get his shirt off too, before he sets her down on the bed and leans back to admire her. His eyes are huge and dark and wanting, and any instinctual urge to cover herself is burned away in the heat of his gaze. She’s free to creep her hands up the broad expanse of his chest, and card her fingers through the hair there. 

“You okay?” she breathes, her tone half joking, half in earnest. He smirks. 

“Nope. I have pretty big problem that I think I need your help with.” Her hands travel lower, to palm him through his sweatpants and he groans and shuts his eyes at her touch. . 

“Oh yeah? Well I do like helping you out when you’re in trouble. Although I think I should be the one to judge the size of this particular problem.” 

“Ouch, Hawke.” She wonder’s for a split second if he’s being serious, but he’s smiling and looking at her like she’s everything, there’s no hurt, this is just a new game they can play together. “Going to have to make you pay for that one.” He tugs at her jeans and she lifts her hips off the bed, helping him shove them down her legs and kicks them off onto the floor. Varric runs a hand between her legs and she presses her head back into the pillows and moans softly with the sensation. 

“These gotta go too, sweetheart,” he says, and her panties join her jeans on the floor. He drags his fingers over her breasts and she shivers with pleasure when he bends his head down and kisses her throat, her collarbone, the valley between her breast before taking a pebbled nipple in his mouth and beginning to suck. 

“Varric!” she exclaims, and she feels him smile against her left breast. She grips the back of his head with one hand and scrambles for purchase on the bedsheets with the other. 

“How long has it been, Hawke?” he asks. She doesn’t answer, and he turns his attention to the right side of her body, his hand replacing his mouth on the left. Just as she has gotten used to the feeling of having him there, and the small breathy moans she makes while he’s at it, Varric starts sliding down on the bed and for a moment she’s not sure what he’s doing until one of her legs has been thrown over his shoulder and his nose brushes the inside of her thigh and - 

“Fuuuck!” she whimpers as she finds an entirely new reason to be grateful for Varric’s clever tongue. In all the unspoken fantasies she had played out in her head late at night in her own dorm, she knew he would be good in bed, but she had no idea it could be like this, with one of his hands gripping her ass so his mouth could get a better angle, the quick pants of her breath matching the rhythm of her hips as they move against his face, the physical pleasure rolling through her at the same time her heart feels full to bursting. 

But she doesn’t want it to end in this one sided thing. She feels stupid and romantic, but she wants this first time to be special, to be perfect. 

“I-I want you,” she murmurs. He takes his tongue off her clit and flicks his eyes toward her. The sight of him looking at her like that from between her legs nearly undoes her completely, but Hawke manages to recover. 

“You got me, Hawke,” he says, and something squeezes in her chest and she can barely get her next words out. 

“You know what I mean. Please?” 

She doesn’t have to ask a third time. He kicks his pants and boxers off and shudders when she runs a finger down his length. Varric tries to lay her back against the pillows, but Hawke is having none of it, and slides out from under him. 

“My turn,” she says, and guides him back down to the bed. She straddles him, he grabs her hips and supports her as she lowers herself down onto him, hissing in pleasure when he’s fully inside her, at the sensation of being filled. She’s so warm, she can feel her blush spreading down her neck to her breasts, and she watches his gaze work its way down her body. The first time she lifts herself up and slides back down on his cock he makes a sound somewhere between a shout and a gasp and he pushes up into her, and it takes them a minute but they stumble upon a cadence, their bodies moving together, hurtling towards a height neither of them would have believed was possible to reach with the other not six hours before. Then there is nothing but whispered words and shouted pleasure and the slap two forms meeting again and again. 

Hawke feels the warmth building in her belly, hears herself getting louder and knows he knows it too. He smirks and works two fingers between their bodies to rub her clit and she plunges over the edge, body quivering, hands gripping his shoulders as she rides out her orgasm. He thrusts up into her hard and fast and desperate and joins her with a cry, pulls her toward him and clutches at her back, short nails leaving half moon scratches down her shoulder blades. Her thighs burn, her legs feel weak and unsteady, and she collapses forward on top of him, tucking her head under his chin, chest hair lightly tickling her cheek. He brings his arms around her, big hands absently stroking down her back. They lay in silence for a few minutes as their breathing evens out. He plants a small kiss on her forehead and she snuggles closer. 

She feels safe. 

 

Four hours later, Anya Hawke is stuck in traffic on the George Washington Bridge. 

She probably shouldn’t have left so close to rush hour, but whatever. She drums her hands on the steering wheel to the jaunty beat of the song on the radio, and couldn’t wipe the shit eating grin off her face if she tried. She’s not even afraid of the bridge, or the cold black water that flows beneath them. Varric is sitting shotgun, head leaning against the window. He might be asleep, or resting his eyes against physical or emotional exhaustion. 

She texted Isabela the sad news about her lost bet when they left his mansion, her head held high as they swept past his security team. The front of her jeep was all fucked up but it still ran, and they threw Varric’s bags into the backseat and peeled out of the driveway, ignoring Gerav’s requests for something to tell Varric’s parents about his sudden departure. Isabela was disappointed, but texted back something appropriately filthy to let her know there was no hard feelings. 

A chorus of horns beep somewhere on the road ahead of her, and it shakes Varric out of his reverie. 

“We there yet?” he asks. 

“Nah,” she replies. “Like six more hours to go. Go back to sleep.” He burrows deeper into his coat. 

“Can we turn the heat on?”

“You know the heat doesn’t work in this car.”

He’s quiet for a few moments, like he didn’t remember what terrible shape her jeep was in, like he’s finally piecing together her actions over the last twenty-four hours.Then he reaches over and squeezes her hand. 

“Hey Hawke?” 

“Yeah?” 

“I love you.” She curls her fingers over the steering wheel. 

“Well, after I’ve driven eight hours on my own in the middle of the night in a freezing cold car, destroyed your dad’s gates, fought off your security team, fought and then banged you, I think admitting you love me is probably the least you can do.” 

“Hawke…” He drags out her name, and she can hear the smile behind it. 

“Fine. Varric, I drove eight hours, destroyed your gates, battled your weird bodyguards and would have set that whole place on fire if I thought it would make you come home because I love you, and I couldn’t imagine what I would do without you. That about what you’re looking for?” 

“Yup! Wake me up when we get home, okay sweetheart?” Hawke playfully shoves him, then returns to concentrating on the brake lights in front of her. He settles back against the window, and soon she can hear his breathing turn long and deep. 

She drives them on through the night, back toward Thedas, back toward Kirkwall. 

Back towards home.


End file.
